Excuse me while I remove this beam in my eye

From Stratfor.

We suspect that Rumsfeld and his people are aware of this issue. The problem is that the Bush administration is in an election year, and increasing the force by 50 percent or doubling it is not something officials want to do now. It cannot be done by conscription. Not only are the mechanisms for large-scale conscriptions missing, but a conscript army is the last thing needed: The U.S. military requires a level of technical proficiency and commitment that draftees don't bring to bear.

To keep the force at its current size, Congress must allocate a large amount of money for personnel retention. A father of three with a mortgage payment based on his civilian income cannot live on military pay. Military pay must not be permitted to rise; it must be forced to soar. This is not only to retain the current force size but to increase it. In addition to bringing in raw recruits and training them, this also means, as in World War II, bringing back trained personnel who have left the service and -- something the military will gag over -- bringing in trained professionals from outside, directly into the chain of command and not just as civilian employees.

Thinking out of the box is something Washington always talks about but usually does by putting a box of corn flakes on top of their heads. That's all right in peacetime -- but this is war, and war is a matter of life and death. In the end, this is the problem: While American men and women fight and die on foreign land, the Pentagon's personnel officers are acting like this is peacetime. The fault lies with a series of unexpected events and Rumsfeld's tendency to behave as if nothing comes as a surprise.

The defense secretary needs to understand that in war, being surprised is not a failure -- it is the natural commission. The measure of a good command is not that one anticipates everything, but that one quickly adjusts and responds to the unexpected. No one expected this type of guerrilla war in Iraq, although perhaps in retrospect, everyone should have. But it is here, and next year will bring even more surprises. The Army speaks of "A Force of One." We prefer "The Force Ready for the Unexpected." The current U.S. force is not.

Of course, the question as to whether we should be here in the first place, or simply the question as to whether we should be here alone is not answered. After all, politics and diplomacy seem to have no place in the "War Against Terror".

<sigh>